domingo, 20 de enero de 2013

Extreme Weather Rages Worldwide

Heat, Flood or Icy Cold, Extreme Weather Rages Worldwide

WORCESTER, England — Britons may remember 2012 as the year the
weather spun off its rails in a chaotic concoction of drought, deluge
and flooding, but the unpredictability of it all turns out to have been
all too predictable: Around the world, extreme has
become the new commonplace.
Especially lately. China is
enduring its coldest winter in nearly 30 years. Brazil is in the grip of a
dreadful heat spell. Eastern Russia is so freezing — minus 50
degrees Fahrenheit, and counting — that the traffic lights recently
stopped working in the city of Yakutsk.
Bush fires are
raging across Australia, fueled by a record-shattering heat wave. Pakistan was inundated by unexpected
flooding in September.
A vicious storm bringing rain, snow and floods just struck the Middle
East. And in the United States, scientists confirmed this week what
people could have
figured out simply by going outside:
last year was the hottest since records began.
“Each year we have extreme weather, but it’s unusual to have so many
extreme events around the world at once,” said Omar Baddour, chief of
the data management applications division at the World Meteorological
Organization, in Geneva. “The heat wave in Australia;
the flooding in the U.K., and most recently the flooding and extensive
snowstorm in the Middle East — it’s already a big year in terms of
extreme weather calamity.”
Such events are increasing in intensity as well as frequency, Mr.
Baddour said, a sign that climate change is not just about rising
temperatures, but also about intense, unpleasant, anomalous weather of
all kinds.
Here in Britain, people are used to thinking of rain as the wallpaper
on life’s computer screen — an omnipresent, almost comforting
background presence. But even the hardiest citizen was rattled by the
near-biblical fierceness of the rains that bucketed
down, and the floods that followed, three different times in 2012.
Rescuers plucked people by boat from their swamped homes in St.
Asaph, North Wales. Whole areas of the country were cut off when roads
and train tracks were inundated at Christmas. In Megavissey, Cornwall, a
pub owner closed his business for good after it
flooded 11 times in two months.
It was no anomaly: the floods of 2012 followed the floods of 2007 and
also the floods of 2009, which all told have resulted in nearly $6.5
billion in insurance payouts. The Met Office, Britain’s weather service,
declared 2012 the wettest year in England,
and the second-wettest in Britain as a whole, since records began more
than 100 years ago. Four of the five wettest years in the last century
have come in the past decade (the fifth was in 1954).
The biggest change, said Charles Powell, a spokesman for the Met
Office, is the frequency in Britain of “extreme weather events” —
defined as rainfall reaching the top 1 percent of the average amount for
that time of year. Fifty years ago, such episodes
used to happen every 100 days; now they happen every 70 days, he said.
The same thing is true in Australia, where bush fires are raging
across Tasmania and the current heat wave has come after two of the
country’s wettest years ever. On Tuesday, Sydney experienced its
fifth-hottest day since records began in 1910, with the
temperature climbing to 108.1 degrees. The first eight days of 2013
were among the 20 hottest on record.
Every decade since the 1950s has been hotter in Australia than the
one before, said Mark Stafford Smith, science director of the Climate
Adaptation Flagship at the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial
Research Organization.
To the north, the extremes have swung the other way, with a band of
cold settling across Russia and Northern Europe, bringing thick snow and
howling winds to Stockholm, Helsinki and Moscow. (Incongruously, there
were also severe snowstorms in Sicily and
southern Italy for the first time since
World War II; in December, tornadoes and waterspouts struck the Italian coast.)
In Siberia, thousands of people were left without heat when natural
gas liquefied in its pipes and water mains burst. Officials canceled bus
transportation between cities for fear that roadside breakdowns could
lead to deaths from exposure, and motorists
were advised not to venture far afield except in columns of two or
three cars. In Altai, to the east, traffic officials warned drivers not
to use poor-quality diesel, saying that it could become viscous in the
cold and clog fuel lines.
Meanwhile, China is enduring its worst winter in recent memory, with
frigid temperatures recorded in Harbin, in the northeast. In the western
region of Xinjiang, more than 1,000 houses collapsed under a relentless
onslaught of snow, while in Inner Mongolia,
180,000 livestock froze to death. The cold has wreaked havoc with
crops, sending the price of vegetables soaring.
Way down in South America, energy analysts say that Brazil may face
electricity rationing for the first time since 2002, as a heat wave and a
lack of rain deplete the reservoirs for
hydroelectric plants. The summer has been punishingly hot. The
temperature in Rio de Janeiro climbed to 109.8 degrees on Dec. 26, the
city’s highest temperature since official records began in 1915.
At the same time, in the Middle East, Jordan is battling a storm
packing torrential rain, snow, hail and floods that are cascading
through tunnels, sweeping away cars and spreading misery in Syrian
refugee camps. Amman has been virtually paralyzed, with
cars abandoned, roads impassable and government offices closed.
Israel and the
Palestinian territories are grappling with similar conditions, after
a week of intense rain and cold winds ushered in a snowstorm that
dumped eight inches in Jerusalem alone.
Amir Givati, head of the surface water department at the Israel
Hydrological Service, said the storm was truly unusual because of its
duration, its intensity and its breadth. Snow and hail fell not just in
the north, but as far south as the desert city of
Dimona, best known for its nuclear reactor.
In Beirut on Wednesday night, towering waves crashed against the
Corniche, the seaside promenade downtown, flinging water and foam dozens
of feet in the air as lightning flickered across the dark sea at
multiple points along the horizon. Many roads were
flooded as hail pounded the city.
Several people died, including a baby boy in a family of shepherds
who was swept out of his mother’s arms by floodwaters. The greatest
concern was for the 160,000 Syrian refugees who have fled to Lebanon,
taking shelter in schools, sheds and, where possible,
with local families. Some refugees are living in farm outbuildings,
which are particularly vulnerable to cold and rain.
Barry Lynn, who runs a forecasting business and is a lecturer at the
Hebrew University’s department of earth science, said a striking aspect
of the whole thing was the severe and prolonged cold in the upper
atmosphere, a big-picture shift that indicated
the Atlantic Ocean was no longer having the moderating effect on
weather in the Middle East and Europe that it has historically.
“The intensity of the cold is unusual,” Mr. Lynn said. “It seems the
weather is going to become more intense; there’s going to be more
extremes.”
In Britain, where changes to the positioning of the jet stream — a
ribbon of air high up in the atmosphere that helps steer weather systems
— may be contributing to the topsy-turvy weather, people are still
recovering from the December floods. In Worcester
last week, the river Severn remained flooded after three weeks, with
playing fields buried under water.
In the shop at the Worcester Cathedral, Julie Smith, 54, was struggling, she said, to adjust to the new uncertainty.
“For the past seven or eight years, there’s been a serious incident
in a different part of the country,” Mrs. Smith said. “We don’t expect
extremes. We don’t expect it to be like this.”
Reporting was contributed by Jodi Rudoren from Jerusalem; Irit Pazner
Garshowitz from Tzur Hadassah, Israel; Fares Akram from Gaza City,
Gaza; Ellen Barry and Andrew Roth from Moscow; Ranya Kadri from Amman,
Jordan; Dan Levin from Harbin, China; Jim Yardley
from New Delhi; Anne Barnard from Beirut, Lebanon; Matt Siegel from
Sydney, Australia; Scott Sayare from Paris; and Simon Romero from Rio de
Janeiro.

From my own double position, being able of making texts diferent in complexity, recursivities, and "normalised" comprehension,

I see towards others, minimalist, lineal texts, nor complex bui complicated, in the low efixienxy by lineal distance read, as if you count the numbers of cars from your window, the number of empty cars, and think:

What a complicated too much transport systems for putting so many slaves in rutinary (triomphalo) proccession, as saying: We prefer today maintain our US country INFRADEVELOPED, in so many social etc areas.,